SugarCRM Trots Out Sugar 7.9 With Quotes

SugarCRM on Wednesday announced the general availability of Sugar 7.9 with a new quote-generation and management feature that helps users turn opportunities into closed deals.

The upgrade provides next-generation reporting capabilities, plus enhanced advanced workflow, which lets users trigger a process based on fields changing to or from specific values.

Sugar 7.9 includes additional operators for evaluating text fields, and additional variable user options for record assignment. It has an improved data query framework, as phase one of the company's reporting feature remake.

Other new features:

a new list view based on Sugar Sidecar;

a new Sugar Intelligence Panel and other new report capabilities;

an enhanced data query framework;

support for PHP 7;

prepared statements, which help prevent SQL injection attacks;

a new help popup that replaces the existing help dashboard;

structured global search using Boolean operators; and

library updates.

Sugar 7.9 supports upgrades from 7.8.x and is available for all deployment types, including on-demand and on-premises. It's compatible and supported for new installations and upgrades for customers running on MySQL, DB2, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Sugar 7.9 PHP 7.1 certification will be released in a coming update, said David Folk, SugarCRM's VP of product management.

"We're targeting later this summer," he told CRM Buyer. Until then, PHP 5.6 will continue to be the officially supported version.

The quoting capabilities "are a great way for customers to get additional value from Sugar," observed Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

"Edge apps such as CPQ deliver 4.2 times the ROI of core CRM features such as sales force automation," she told CRM Buyer.

Platform Focus

Sugar 7.9's revamped reports list lets users leverage common features such as field filtering, favorites designation and the intelligence pane, Folk noted. It also lets users tag reports to improve their organization.

The new help popup lets users "see their intelligence pane content while reviewing help information," he pointed out.

The changes constitute phase one of SugarCRM's remake of its reporting features.

"Phase two is in progress," SugarCRM's Flock said.

"Directionally, we're focusing on charts -- clickthroughs, improved support for rendering in PDFs, etc.," he added.

"Advanced reporting and analytics is a key demand from CRM customers, and [SugarCRM] Chief Product Officer Rich Green is driving the changes based on his deep expertise in analytics," said Constellation Research's Zhou. "This is great for Sugar customers."

Hurdles to Overcome

However, SugarCRM is still lacking deep functionality in areas such as marketing and sales force automation, which it delivers through partners, according to Nucleus Research's CRM Technology Value Matrix 1H2017 report.

"Their biggest challenge," Zhou said, "is that they're in a highly competitive market with Salesforce, Oracle and other players."

Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.